Rumney, Jay. Herbert Spencer’s Sociology. London, 1934.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne,
- Translated, with annotation, by Roy Harris as Course
in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Se-
chehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Reidlinger (Lon-
don, 1983). The best English edition of a major structuralist
classic.
Tax, Sol, et al., eds. An Appraisal of Anthropology Today. Chicago,
- Lévi-Strauss’s “Social Structure” is discussed on pages
108–118.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Progress: Structure and Anti-Structure
(1969). Ithaca, N.Y., 1977. Although Turner is often called
a structuralist, his style of analysis differs widely from that of
Lévi-Strauss.
EDMUND LEACH (1987)
STRUCTURALISM [FURTHER CONSID-
ERATIONS]. In 1970, Sir Edmund Leach wrote in his
book about Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–) that structuralism
was held by many to be a new philosophy. “Lévi-Strauss,”
he stated, “is regarded among the intellectuals of his own
country as the leading exponent of ‘Structuralism,’ a word
which has come to be used as if it denoted a whole new phi-
losophy of life on the analogy of ‘Marxism’ or ‘Existential-
ism.’ What is this ‘Structuralism’ all about?” (1970, p. 15).
Leach has answered the question himself in a number of pub-
lications. His characterization may certainly be an apt im-
pression of what was “in the air” in the 1960s. Later this was
to change, but it is not quite off the mark to say that post-
structuralism—sometimes presented as postmodernism—
has since been highly advertised as much more than a meth-
od or a fashion; it has been heralded as grasping the very spir-
it of the age. It may seem so if one discusses the latest trends
in late modern societies, but when applied to religion and
the study of religion, the attractiveness of the latest intellec-
tual fashions fade. Religions and religious traditions are
much more conventional, traditional, and ritualized than
late modern trends and fashions, and it therefore makes good
sense to study religions and matters pertaining to religion in
a structuralist framework.
It is the basic premise of structuralism that human so-
ciocultural products, such as language and religion, are sign
systems in which any entity becomes meaningful only in re-
lation to the system and its rules and against a structured
background. The structures and rules are mostly followed
unconsciously. Ironically, post-structural phenomena may
thus also be analyzed in structuralist terms.
Thus, structuralism is by no means exhausted as an ap-
proach to human cultural and social formations. The long
philosophical debate over whether the structures retrieved in
analysis are preeminently to derive from minds producing
culture or are to be located in the products themselves dis-
solves to an extent in a structuralist perspective. That is be-
cause all cultural products, be they language, symbolism, reli-
gion, or any other aspect of culture, are and must be
structured if they are to be understandable by and meaning-
ful to other humans. This leads to an evaluation of structur-
alism as more than simply one method among others of
equal standing. It has been suggested by Peter Caws (1997)
that structuralism may indeed be the philosophy for the
human sciences. That the term structuralism covers a wide
array of subjects is evident from the introduction by John
Lechte in his Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers (1996) to
many of the prominent thinkers in the history of the struc-
turalist movement, from the earliest inspirations to the later
postmodernist phases.
REVISIONS AND CRITICISMS. As scholars pick up the struc-
turalist tradition as an approach in the study of religion, they
are able to review, revise, and continue to develop the struc-
turalist approach. Although the earlier stage of structuralist
scholarship was much concerned with exegeses of the most
“canonical” writing of, especially, Lévi-Strauss, subsequent
research has not been uncritical of the “masters,” and it has
also been able to advance and transform the initial inspira-
tions and to solidify and justify the structuralist paradigm
(Johnson, 2003).
One of the critical points in the early structuralist period
was a rather consistent criticism concerning the validity and
replicability of structural analysis and the more practical is-
sues of method: How does one proceed and where are struc-
tures to be found? Are they part of the “native’s reality”—are
they in the human mind or in sociocultural products? Are
they conscious or subconscious representational models or
are they analytical and explanatory models made by the ana-
lyst? Leach’s suspicion was quite clear:
In all his writings Lévi-Strauss assumes that the simple
first-stage “model” generated by the observer’s first im-
pressions corresponds quite closely to a genuine (and
very important) ethnographic reality— the “conscious
model” which is present in the minds of the anthropol-
ogist’s informants.... It seems all too obvious that
this initial model is little more than an amalgam of the
observer’s own prejudiced presuppositions. (1970,
p.12)
Leach also remarks that Lévi-Strauss “consistently behaves
like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist
searching for ultimate truth” (1970, p. 12). Although “ulti-
mate truth” seems outside the range of human knowledge,
the implications are clear enough. On the other hand, since
the days when it was necessary to defend structuralism as a
new approach, analyses have proved quite fruitful in many
areas of the human sciences, from social anthropology to
media studies to biblical scholarship. As Stanley J. Tambiah
has illustrated in his Edmund Leach (2002), Leach’s own pro-
duction is a fine example of this fruitfulness, especially in re-
lation to cultural codes, classificatory systems, and ritual for-
mations. Further, it should be emphasized that semiotics,
discourse analysis, and a range of other approaches would
have been unthinkable without the influence of struc-
turalism.STRUCTURALISM [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS] 8757